Political Leadership, Parties and Citizens

Jean Blondel, Jean-Louis Thiebault

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135179212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Social structure may historically have been of primary importance in accounting for the attitudes and behaviour of many citizens, but now changes in social structure have diminished the role played by class and religious affiliation, whilst the significance of personality in political leadership has increased. This volume explores, both theoretically and empirically, the increasingly important role played by the personalisation of leadership. Acknowledging the part played by social cleavages, it focuses on the personal relationships and psychological dimension between citizens and political leaders. It begins by examining the changes which have taken place in the relationship among citizens, the parties which they support and the leaders of these parties in a European context. The authors then assess how far the phenomena of 'personalised leadership' differ from country to country, and the forms which these differences take. The book includes comparative case studies on Britain and Northern Ireland, France, Italy, Poland, Japan and Thailand; it concentrates on eleven prominent leaders epitomising personalised political leadership: Thatcher, Blair, Mitterand, Chirac, Le Pen, Berlusconi, Bossi, Walesa, Lepper, Koizumi and Thaksin. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, comparative politics and political leadership.

1
Introduction

Taking the psychological dimension into account

From the last decades of the twentieth century, the ‘classical’ explanation put forward to account for the relationship between parties and citizens in Western Europe began to experience serious problems, although that explanation had seemed so realistic in the 1950s and 1960s. A central position had been given to parties, but that central position came to be in question, for parties were no longer as solidly anchored in the society as they had been in previous decades. This was in turn because ‘social cleavages’ such as class, religious or regional appartenance, which tied citizens to parties, no longer had the same hold over the European population as had been the case previously. At a minimum, there was some loosening of the links between citizens and the political system which had prevailed for a generation and even more, at least in the countries which had escaped the political turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s.

Was it that one should go further and adopt a new configuration of the relations between citizens and the political elite? There was considerable reluctance to go in that direction, perhaps understandably, since the changes which were taking place were slow and gradual and occurred in some countries more markedly than in others. Thus, to this day, most political scientists concerned with these questions have found it difficult to accept that a new model, perhaps a new paradigm, needed to be elaborated.

The aim of this work is not to go so far, but to put forward the view that the model which had privileged ‘social cleavages’ as the key was rather ‘unbalanced’. It is true that ‘modernisation’ had led to a kind of nationalisation of politics in Western Europe and that ‘mass’ party organisations, possibly as a result, had been for a while the instrument par excellence of the nationalisation process. It was certainly exaggerated, however, to seem to conclude that that process had had the effect of replacing altogether the more individualised and personalised forms of relationship which had previously prevailed at local level and were indeed still very apparent among the members of the political elite. As a matter of fact, while the process of ‘modernisation’ continued throughout the twentieth century, its effect was no longer to reinforce the social character of the relationships between citizens and the political system, but, on the contrary, to reduce the weight of the social structure on the population as a whole: with the spread of education, reactions of citizens were becoming more independent from the social groups to which they had been attached, especially if class was viewed as the main ‘cleavage’, but even where other cleavages, such as those based on religious or regional appartenance, had a prominent place. Individuals seemed to count rather more, with all their characteristics and not merely with those characteristics binding them to a group often, perhaps typically, not even of their own choosing.

To be empirically sustainable, however, a balanced approach including personal relationships alongside the impact of the social structure implied taking two steps. First, personal influence must have a significant part to play in accounting for the way in which links between citizens and the elite and in particular the party elite emerge and develop. Second, psychological characteristics must have a place alongside the sociological or socio-economic relationships which the ‘classical’ interpretation of the role of parties in Europe in effect privileged. As a matter of fact, these two aspects have to be viewed as part of a combined approach to the analysis of political relationships: the questions posed by the need to take into account personal influence and by the need to give a place to psychological analysis are two elements of a single, but differently focused way of looking at the relationship between citizens and the key actors in the political process.

If both personal influence and, more generally, a psychological approach are to be taken into account alongside social structural analysis, a serious practical question has to be overcome. These areas are in almost all aspects terra incognita at any rate in (Western) Europe: European political scientists are not accustomed to deal with psychological concepts in the way they have been accustomed to do so, almost from the first day of their undergraduate career, with sociological concepts. Similar difficulties arise when one is examining the possible influence of personalities on citizens (and even more so when one wants to look at the converse type of influence). Such handicaps cannot be expected to be fully overcome unless a major change occurs in patterns of training and research in political science. This book can therefore constitute only a preliminary presentation of the part played by personal influence in political behaviour, and especially in electoral behaviour, within the general context of a major part having to be given to the psychological relationships circumscribing the contours of that personal influence.

To be convincing, however, such a presentation must first show that there is a prima facie case for moving in the direction which has been presented so far. This means examining in some detail the difficulties which the ‘sociological’ analysis of political behaviour has had to face in Western Europe from the last decades of the twentieth century: this examination is the subject of the coming chapter. Meanwhile, at least some evidence must be provided showing that personal influence has increased in the course of the last decades of the twentieth century and that the examination of psychological variables becomes imperative in such a context: it is to these points that we are now turning.

Decline of very well-established parties and increased influence, since the 1980s, of personalised leaders: three different aspects

If one is to look for the decline of well-established parties and the apparent increased influence, in the last decades of the twentieth century, of the role of what will be referred to herein as ‘personalised’ leaders, three sets of cases clearly provide at least some preliminary evidence. The first set concerns the fact that the party systems of the three Scandinavian countries became gradually internally weaker, with major splits and the emergence of new parties, in Denmark first, in Norway second, and, third, still with some limitations, in Sweden, while, in the 1950s, party systems in the three Scandinavian countries were ‘rock-solid’ (and, therefore, perhaps not surprisingly, a Norwegian scholar developed the ‘social cleavages’ model). The second set of cases relates to the emergence of personalised leaders at the border, so to speak, and typically at the right-wing border, of political life in a number of countries, namely France (but such a development could be regarded as not being truly ‘exceptional’ in that country), Italy, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. The third set of cases concerns the emergence of personalised leaders at the top of large parties, in an unprecedented manner, especially since the 1980s, in Spain, Britain and Italy.

New parties and decline of large dominant parties in Scandinavia

We will examine in the next chapter the general problem posed by the decline of what can be described as the ‘traditional’ large parties throughout Western Europe in the course of the last decades of the twentieth century. The case of the Scandinavian countries is most peculiar, however, since these were the countries where parties were regarded as particularly solid and where the ‘social cleavage’ theory seemed to be most directly applicable to political parties: the Labour or Social-Democratic parties had indeed obtained, at a number of elections since 1945, a dominant 40 per cent of the votes. Projected membership of the European Community was the direct cause of the decline of the Social Democratic or Labour parties in Denmark, first, and in Norway, second; but this occasion provided an opportunity for the fringe parties of the Right (rather than of the Left), to make inroads on the electoral scene.

Perhaps the most interesting case is that of Sweden, however: the country escaped the trauma due to the prospective membership of the EC in the 1970s as it remained ‘neutral’ at the time; it even escaped, possibly as a result, the ‘dilution’ of the party system which characterised Denmark and Norway in the subsequent decade: but that ‘dilution’ began to occur in the 1990s in Sweden as well. From then on the Social democratic party ceased to be the wholly dominant force it had been for decades, including even when it had to endure a stint of opposition, as between 1976 and 1982. The party appeared to be suffering from the same symptoms of decline as those of the other two Scandinavian countries. The paradoxical result of that evolution in Scandinavia is that, as a result, the truly strong party systems are no longer in the North of Europe, but in Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Personalised leaders in fringe parties, typically of the Right

Since the mid-1970s, but since then only, a crop of fringe right-wing party leaders emerged in such diverse countries as France, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, where new parties were set up, and in Austria and Switzerland, where small parties were entirely ‘renovated’; except in France¹ and to a more limited extent in Italy, these cases were unprecedented, and they can be regarded as having been exceptional in the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. The very ‘creation’ or ‘renovation’ of these parties was due to leaders who were truly central to their parties and therefore deserve entirely their description as personalised leaders; this was so, although, in some cases, there were changes among these leaders, but also of parties in the process. Except in France and Italy, there were no previous examples of such parties in the first quarter of century after the Second World War.

Personalised leaders in ruling large parties

Italy, with Silvio Berlusconi, is the clearest direct example of the emergence of the case of a personalised leader who created a large, indeed a ruling party; it is also the only such case since the Second World War except for France, in 1958, as a result of the political debacle provoked by the Algerian war: but, as was pointed out in Note 1, France was also the only Western European country at the time which lacked a ‘well-organised’ party system and had experienced such a lack at least since the First World War. In this sense, French politics was markedly different from the politics of Western Europe.

In Italy, the case of Silvio Berlusconi as a personalised leader of a party at his devotion is so obvious that there seems no need to examine it at any length; it must be noted, however, that the founder of the Christian Democratic party, after the fall of Mussolini, De Gasperi, had failed by the early 1950s to create a party in which a personalised leader would dominate political life; successive prime ministers, for instance Fanfani or Craxi, did effectively failed as well in this respect.

There are two other Western European countries, however, Britain and Spain, where personalised leadership did prevail from the late 1970s and the early 1980s. In Spain, Felipe Gonzalez proved that the democratic party system could be successful in the country if it was ruled, not by manipulating politicians, as was the case from Franco’s death to 1982, but by a leader around whom key decisions were taken, who attracted a large number of ‘advisers’ at his devotion and who sought strong support among the population, that is to say was a personalised leader.

The British case, with Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair, needs to be examined in somewhat greater detail: in twenty-eight years, between 1979 and 2007, the country was ruled by three prime ministers only, two of whom, Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair, were in power continuously for ten years: this was unprecedented in the twentieth century. Winston Churchill did hold the position for nine years, but in two different occasions; Harold Wilson was eight years in office, but in two successive cases as well. No British prime minister from Asquith to Mrs Thatcher was in office continuously for more than six years; in the first twenty-eight years after the Second World War, from 1945 to 1973, seven prime ministers ruled the country, not three.

Yet the peculiarity of the cases of Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair is not primarily duration in office; what is more peculiar is that these two prime ministers were the only ones in the post-Second World War decades who could be described as having been truly personalised leaders. However personalised was Churchill’s leadership, it was not only exercised during an extraordinary period, but it was brutally broken as a result of the British electorate not allowing the wartime leader of the country to be the leader of the post-war reconstruction. The only other prime minister of the period to have probably approached personalised leadership was Harold Macmillan, who was prime minister between 1957 and 1963: but, although he appears to have exercised some influence on the electorate in 1957, he did not change, nor did he wish to, the character of British political life. Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair did, and they did so at a time when their parties, respectively Conservative and Labour, needed to experience a major refurbishing, so to speak, if these parties were to hold to their dominant position. The case of these two leaders is thus unprecedented in the second half of the twentieth century, indeed since 1918.

The role of personalised leaders and the need for a systematic psychological interpretation of political behaviour

While the examples which have just been given provide evidence, but not a demonstration, that personalised leaders tend by and large to have emerged since the 1980s after a long period of party dominance, such cases can be meaningfully analysed only if a different model is used from the one which had been adopted to account for the development of the ‘traditional’ parties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The impact of leadership personalisation on the citizenry (and vice versa) cannot be assessed and even begin to be discussed unless the framework of the study is also psychological and not exclusively sociological. The very notion of personalisation of leadership makes sense only if one takes into account, indeed one gives a major emphasis to, a rapport between leaders and citizens based on such feelings as the appreciation of qualities and defects of the persons concerned, including the ability on the part of the leaders to transmit messages which are emotionally loaded and not merely tapping a ‘rational’ chord.

The key difficulty, as was pointed out at the outset in this Introduction, stems from the fact that the conceptual and even more empirical instruments at the disposal of political scientists in relation to psychological analysis are at best deficient, if not in fact non-existent, largely because modern political science, at any rate in Western Europe, has been typically closed to psychological interpretations. Indeed even the conception of what is regarded as psychological, in the area of electoral behaviour in particular, is typically merely the recognition that interviewees in opinion polls or in focus groups have ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ and that these have to be assessed. Yet the fact of noting that citizens have likes or dislikes is not in itself a psychological investigation; it is merely the starting point of such an investigation. After all, people may have likes or dislikes because of certain social characteristics, for instance when they feel that a given party includes too many members of a particular social class. This does not mean that these likes and dislikes should not be examined – especially to discover what can be described as the temperature and the specific object of these sentiments. The examination of the temperature reveals the extent to which the individuals concerned are involved in the sentiments which they express: in many, perhaps in the large majority of the cases, especially those concerned national political activities, the temperature is likely to be low.² The determination of what was just referred to as the ‘specific object’ is also important. The sentiments which are expressed may indeed concern the substance of the problem; in many cases, however, the persons at the origin (or, more precisely, felt to be at the origin) of the policy or of the proposal may be the real objects of the reaction. Likes and dislikes, love and hatred may be – are often – as much related to those who suggest a course of action as to the course of action itself.

The analysis becomes truly psychological only when the reasons for these sentiments are examined. The categorisation of the reasons for attitudes is undertaken commonly, indeed daily, in ‘informal’ discussions about expected outcomes. These discussions typically raise a number of ‘personality traits’, such as the energy, intelligence, or ability to get on with others, of the individuals concerned; indeed these points are often raised at the same time as the social characteristics of these individuals. ‘Personality traits’ need therefore to be regarded as ‘facts’ in a psychological analysis in the same way as are taken as ‘facts’ in a sociological framework the class background, the religiosity or the regional origins of these individuals. So long as inquiries into personality characteristics are not undertaken, however, the analysis of political relationships will remain partial, since we shall not be able to discover what are the real ties between citizens and the political elite.

It is worth remembering the points made several decades ago by F.W. Green-stein about the need to place at the same level psychological and sociological (or socio-economic) explanations (Greenstein 1987). As we noted, political scientists have a basic knowledge of sociological and of economic concepts, at least in the sense that they can use, almost automatically and instinctively, the key concepts of these disciplines. In the large majority of cases and, in Western Europe, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the same does not apply to key psychological concepts. It is not surprising that these scholars should rarely look for psychological explanations, or that they should do so only after the explanatory power of sociological or socio-economic explanations has been ‘exhausted’: psychological explanations acquire as a result a ‘residual’ character instead of being examined alongside other types of explanation (Greenstein 1987).

As a matter of fact, since it is rare for sociological explanations to account more for a limited part of the overall explanation, the case for entering into the ps...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction Taking the psychological dimension into account
• Part I Personalisation of leaders and citizens–party relationships
• Part II Case studies of party personalisation of leadership
• Bibliography
• Index